Former Italian PM Andreotti dies aged 94

Giulio Andreotti, one of Italy's most prominent post-war figures, whose name was synonymous with cunning and survival, has died aged 94, Italian media reports.

Seven times prime minister and a leading member of the defunct Christian Democrat (DC) party which dominated Italian politics for almost 50 years after World War II, Andreotti was a lawmaker in every Italian parliament since 1945. He was made a senator for life in 1991.

He had been ill with respiratory problems for some time and had been admitted to hospital on several occasions in recent years.

He died at his home in central Rome on Monday, his relatives were quoted as saying.

With a hunched back and understated irony, Andreotti was an iconic figure who polarised Italian public opinion from when he entered government at the age of 28 to when he was accused of murder and mafia involvement in the late 1990s.

In 1999 he was acquitted of ordering the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli.

He was acquitted in 2004 of mafia association after a sensational trial and two appeals.

He first became a member of government in 1947 as a 28-year-old cabinet undersecretary, and held front-line ministerial posts in dozens of Italy's revolving-door governments of the 1970s and 1980s.

He was Italy's youngest interior minister at the age of 34, eight times defence minister and five times foreign minister.

He was prime minister in 1978 when the far-left Red Brigades kidnapped and later killed Christian Democrat president Aldo Moro in one of the darkest chapters of the so-called "years of lead", in the 1970s and 80s, when hundreds of Italians died in political violence.